Works by Frédéric Bazille

Frédéric Bazille painted his family, Renoir and himself, and in many of his main pictures he set the figures in a landscape painted out of doors.

The Pink Dress, painted when he was 23, shows his cousin Thérèse des Hours from behind, sitting on a low stone wall in a striped dress and looking over a village in the sun. Summer Scene, of 1869, lines a stream with young men in bathing trunks: one leans on a tree, one lies in the grass, two wrestle further back, and one is hauled up out of the water by the hand.

He came from a wealthy Protestant family of wine merchants in Montpellier, and works by Eugène Delacroix first drew him to painting, which his family allowed only if he studied medicine as well. In Paris from 1862 he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley and took classes with Charles Gleyre; once he had failed his medical exam in 1864, he painted full time. His Self-Portrait of 1865–66, painted from his reflection while he shared a studio with Claude Monet, shows him half-turned against a dark ground, palette and brushes in hand.

Bazille's Studio, dated 1870, is a tall grey room hung high with canvases, where men stand talking round an easel and another plays the piano. In August 1870 he joined a Zouave regiment, and on 28 November he was hit twice leading an attack at Beaune-la-Rolande and died there, aged 28. The works below are all paintings dated 1864 to 1870, with portraits and figure scenes well ahead of landscapes.

Sources: Wikipedia, Art Institute of Chicago, Musée d'Orsay, Harvard Art Museums.